We start in the state of Florida. The courtroom fell silent as the jury attentively listened to the opening statements in the murder trial of Leslie Demeniuk, a mother from Ponte Vedra accused of killing her twin sons. The prosecution began to unravel the details, painting a picture of a premeditated and cold-blooded crime. It was March 2001 when the serene Sawgrass Country Club was shaken by an incident that sent shockwaves through the community. Prosecutors alleged that Demeniuk, driven by a desire to harm her soon-to-be ex-husband, fatally shot her four-year-old twin sons, Jaime and Johnny, at their father’s home.
And this is why in the beginning I said moronic decision-making. As if you murder your children—that is crazy to do it just to despite your husband. What the hell?
Court documents mistakenly released in 2002 revealed Leslie’s confession. She admitted to the heinous crime, stating her actions clearly.
“I shot both boys in the head.”
“I think I shot Jaime twice. I think I shot one of them twice.”
The state’s case against Leslie was built upon a history of drug use and allegations of intoxication on the day of the murders. The prosecution argued that Leslie had mixed antidepressants with alcohol, leading to an altered state of mind. According to court documents, her blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit.
Leslie’s defense team planned to present an insanity defense, claiming that her mental state was compromised at the time of the murders. Yes, it was compromised by being an idiot—and being an idiot is not a mental state. However, their attempt to attribute her insanity to the combination of alcohol, depressants, and drugs was rejected. Judge John Alexander ruled that there was insufficient scientific evidence to support this claim, a decision later upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.
The prosecution presented their case, calling witnesses who painted a bleak picture of Leslie’s behavior and mental state leading up to the murders. Thomas, the father of the victims, took the stand and testified about his ex-wife’s excessive drinking and his concerns regarding her ability to care for their children. The couple had been granted a divorce just four days before the tragic incident. Thomas recounted the harrowing details of his last encounter with his twin sons, expressing his love for them and his fear for their well-being under their mother’s care. The courtroom was filled with a profound sense of grief as he shared his failed attempts to ensure the safety of the children.
The defense began presenting their case, portraying Leslie as a troubled and depressed woman whose actions were driven by a combination of medications and emotional turmoil. They called experts, including psychologist Dr. David Menkes, who had examined Leslie over a year after the crime. Dr. Menkes argued that the combination of antidepressants and sedatives could have severe side effects. Well, duh! I do not need ten years of school to tell you that, potentially rendering Leslie temporarily insane.
Prosecutors vigorously challenged this assertion during cross-examination, emphasizing the fact that Leslie exhibited coherent behavior immediately after the shootings. The doctor admitted that Leslie knew what she had done and understood the consequences, but he maintained that she did not perceive her actions as morally wrong.
As the trial reached its final phase, both the prosecution and the defense called upon expert witnesses to support their respective cases. The prosecution enlisted the help of forensic psychologist Dr. Robert McCary, who concluded that Leslie was not insane at the time of the murders. Dr. McCary’s testimony underscored the calculated nature of the crime, stating that Leslie had planned the killings in advance, demonstrating premeditation and malice.
The defense countered with forensic psychiatrist Dr. Steven Simring, who argued that Leslie’s mental state was significantly impaired due to the combination of substances. Dr. Simring posited that Leslie’s capacity for rational judgment and self-control was diminished, ultimately leading to the tragic outcome.
After weeks of emotional testimony and intense deliberation, the fate of Leslie rested in the hands of the jury. Leslie was found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder for killing her twin sons. The prosecution decided not to seek the death penalty for Leslie, leaving the sentencing for the judge. Leslie faced the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison. Now, taking into account the severity of the crime and the impact on the victims’ family, the judge handed down a sentence of two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
Now, Leslie did appeal the verdict, and this is what the court documents said. Leslie indicated to the trial court that her insanity was substance-induced, which she asserts led to involuntary intoxication and the eventual death of her children. In support of her position, she retained two more doctors, the original Dr. David Menkes and Dr. Ernest Miller, who provided reports supporting her claim of insanity. These doctors attributed Leslie’s insanity to the prescribed use of modern antidepressants known as SSRIs, which stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Among the SSRIs marketed commonly are Zoloft and Paxil. According to experts, her use of SSRIs caused akathisia, a condition of intense inner restlessness, which in turn caused Leslie to self-medicate with alcohol to an involuntary 0.27 percent level and resulted in her killing her children.
In response, the state also hired two experts, Dr. Alan Waldman and Dr. Douglas Jacobs. These doctors denied the existence of SSRI-induced akathisia with resulting homicidal actions, and both assert that the scientific principles upon which the defense relies are not generally accepted in the scientific community. This, of course, was all going on during her appeal.
The trial court, however, declined to consider their testimony. The state then filed two motions in limine regarding the assertion of SSRI-induced homicidal behavior. They contended that the matters proposed to be testified to by the defense experts were subject to analysis. Now, initially, the trial court, by letter to counsel, denied the motion for a hearing. Specifically, the state objected to the testimony of the defense experts concerning an alleged causal connection between SSRIs and violence, and concerning the proposed testimony that taking SSRIs caused involuntary alcohol consumption. The state contended that the defense testimony on neither subject was pure opinion and that the conclusions were new and novel.
The trial court eventually agreed to consider the issues raised and set a hearing in February of 2004. Now, at the hearing, Dr. Menkes, who was the only witness, testified for about five hours on this day. The state cross-examined Dr. Menkes concerning studies he relied on in reaching his opinion on the SSRIs. The witness related that he based his opinion on two studies regarding premenstrual syndrome that were undertaken in 1992 and 1993, and on a third, unpublished Scottish study regarding depression suffered by some women during premenstrual time periods. He agreed that he had not personally been engaged in research trials of the drugs but said that he used the results of that research in his clinical practice.
The hearing was continued at the conclusion of Dr. Menkes’ testimony. When the hearing reconvened a month later, the trial judge simply announced at the outset that he decided to deny the state’s motion to exclude the testimony of Dr. Menkes and whoever else was going to testify as to the SSRIs.
Anyway, with all that hullabaloo, all that crap, eventually her appeal was rejected, and she is spending the rest of her life in jail. And again, why did this idiot do it? Because she hated her husband! Oh my God, he divorced you four days later, so the fuck what? You are drunk half the time and taking drugs, what do you think is going to happen, you muppet?
Now, I am going to move on to my next story. We go to Canada in the year of 2002. Trust me, this story is so profound.
On August 4, 2002, Nelson Hart drove his three-year-old twin daughters to a secluded beach just to the west of Gander in Newfoundland, where both girls drowned. The deaths had no witnesses. Hart, who was 33 at the time and unable to swim, called the police. He claimed that upon seeing the first girl fall into the water, he jumped into his gray Dodge Shadow and drove for help. With rumors of mental illness and a gambling problem, Hart came under immediate suspicion.
But let’s first take a look at his background. By age 12, Hart had already spent three years in grade five. He had severe reading difficulties. He frequently refused to go to the hospital for serious seizures because he feared the doctors. Then, by his mid-20s, he was jobless and living at home. His seizures grew worse. The episodes became so severe that in October 1997, the provincial government arranged for him to receive live-in care, hiring Jennifer Hicks. However, the young man wanted more than just a nurse, and before long, he and Jennifer were lovers. Soon, she was pregnant with the twins. Karen and Krista were born on March 9, 1999.
Now Hart, who had broken his neck in a car accident the year before their birth, received something of a windfall: a twenty-five thousand dollar insurance claim. When social services discovered the award, they forced him to sell his purchases and relinquish the money. And that was when everything started to go downhill for Nelson. By the time of the drownings, he was spending what little money he had on gambling.
Such were his circumstances on the morning of August 4, 2002, when Hart drove his girls to their deaths. The family had been looking forward to the day’s demolition derby, part of the annual Festival of Flight celebrations that locals call Gander Day. Jennifer got the girls ready but needed a shower and time to do her hair. Now, due to Nelson’s fits, he had always avoided being alone with the twins. But that day, he loaded them into his Dodge Shadow and asked where they would like to go. With that, they set out for Little Harbor, part of Gander Lake.
Upon their arrival, Hart first retrieved Krista from the back seat, setting her on the ground, and then Karen. He had just put the second child down and shut the car door when he says he suffered a massive seizure. Hart recalls one of the girls running.
“I cannot remember whether she was running toward him or the water.”
He looked and saw Krista jump into the water. The fit left him completely confused.
“All I had was a picture with Jennifer. Where’s Jennifer? I could see her, but I couldn’t get to her.”
Though he knows he got behind the wheel of his car, he does not remember driving home. He went home, he picked up Jennifer, and he went back to the harbor. His wife said it did not seem like Nelson was going fast enough, even though he had the gas pedal pushed straight to the floor.
At the beach, they found Krista in the water. She said she had drifted into the middle of the harbor, far beyond reach. Jennifer, who could not swim either, began searching the surrounding forest for Karen, who had disappeared entirely. Nelson, meanwhile, raced to a nearby gas station and called the authorities. Paramedics retrieved Krista, who somehow survived the initial immersion but died the following day in the hospital. They found Karen in the water ten meters from the wharf, already dead. As the police drove away from Little Harbor for questioning later that morning, Hart suffered a second seizure.
“I love my daughters,”
says Hart.
“My own flesh and blood. There are times when I cried, I cried, I cried.”
And at this point, with no witnesses, there was not much the police could do. That was until a few years later. Look at how they trapped him. Listen to this.
Nelson met a random person, a man by the name of Steph Suave, in the winter of 2005 when Suave pulled up and asked him for directions. Then, Suave pulled out a photograph of a young woman with long blonde hair. She was his sister, he said. He claimed she was a drug addict who gambled away her days in the local bars. Their mother, he added, had lung cancer in Montreal and longed to see her daughter before she died. Could Hart help him look for her?
“I’ll give you fifty dollars,”
Suave said. Nelson thought, oh wow, fifty dollars, I could really use that money. Let me go help him.
When they failed to locate the sister in Grand Falls, Suave gave him fifty dollars more and a carton of cigarettes to search another nearby town. But they never did find the woman. The following day, Suave offered him more money to collect a package from his hotel and make a delivery. Before long, Suave was giving him all manner of odd jobs. He and a group of associates said they ran a trucking outfit, and they handed Hart business cards. Hart and his wife were brought along on several trips, and meanwhile, they were being treated by his new employers to pizza dinners, garlic fingers, and free hotel rooms. One night, Suave uncorked a bottle of champagne and sprayed the contents on the ceiling. He was earning more, in part because Suave had begun sending him on trips to the mainland on increasingly mysterious errands.
But then, the truth was revealed. Hart learned he had been recruited by an organized crime group. He traveled extensively in the ensuing months to Halifax, Fredericton, Montreal, and Vancouver. According to Hart, the men had him transporting everything from casino chips and passports to truckloads of cigarettes and cash. It did not take long for Hart himself to feel incredibly vulnerable. He was in Montreal with Suave when the latter received a call.
“We got to see the boss,”
Suave told him. Word had arrived from Gander that a member of a rival gang was poised to tell the police that he had witnessed Hart drown his daughters. The boss, Suave said, was very rich and powerful, and he managed and controlled the entire underworld.
“People go there and get cremated, flushed down the toilet, bye-bye, send you a postcard,”
Suave said. His meeting with the boss was held in a hotel room in Vancouver.
“He was a hard-looking fella,”
Hart says.
“I’m afraid, Nelson,”
the boss told him.
“Tell me how you’ve done away with your daughters.”
Hart protested immediately.
“Never, sir, never! I never hurt my daughters!”
Hart went on to explain his medical condition.
“I’m epileptic, sir.”
And the boss said,
“No, no, no, no, no, no, don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to the boss.”
Hart was absolutely terrified. He then uttered a confession.
“I drowned my daughters. I pushed them over the wharf,”
he told the boss, describing how he knocked the girls into the waters of Little Harbor with his knee. The confession flooded him with a sense of relief. He said,
“I knew I wouldn’t have my ribs broke. I knew I wasn’t going to be made away with.”
After the meeting, the boss greeted his employees.
“Me and Nelson had a chat. He told them Nelson’s okay.”
Then, back in Grand Falls, Hart got a call from Suave. The gang would take care of the man threatening to reveal Hart’s secret, he said. Hart said he told Suave he wanted no part in a murder. Suave reassured him, saying that they would take care of him. If Hart wanted an alibi, Suave told him he would call ahead of time, giving Hart a chance to get in front of a security camera for proof he had been elsewhere.
Hart and his wife were doing their laundry when the call arrived. According to Jennifer, his wife, he did not even permit her to retrieve their clothes, nor would he tell her why he so desperately needed to get to Walmart. Inside the store, Hart turned to her. Jennifer said he told her,
“Jennifer, look up at the camera and smile.”
They stared into the camera for twenty minutes inside Walmart.
The following day, on June 13, 2005, the police arrested Hart at the airport in Gander, where Suave had directed him to pick up a plane ticket for yet another trip to the mainland. As the police gathered outside his car, Hart tried to place a call to Suave. The police said,
“There’s no point in calling Steph, he’s with us.”
Crown prosecutors were armed with Hart’s videotaped confessions to the murders, intercepted by hidden cameras. Suave, the boss, and the others Hart met on his journeys were not gangsters as they claimed to be; they were all undercover police officers. They were part of an elaborate police ruse known as a Mr. Big operation. Such silence on the part of the police leaves Nelson as the sole voice in the story of the police operation. The degree to which he participated, how willing he was to move what he believed was contraband, and how hard the boss needed to work for Nelson’s alleged confession remains unknown beyond his account.
At Nelson’s preliminary hearing, Jennifer was outside the courtroom when Steph, whom the pair referred to by his real name, walked by and said,
“Hello, my son.”
“You cheeky bastard,”
Jennifer told him.
“You got some nerve on you.”
Indeed, Nelson’s family believed him to be innocent and condemned the police.
“I think they overstepped their boundaries,”
said his wife, a position she held even after watching that taped confession.
In June 2005, Nelson was charged with first-degree murder in connection to the deaths of his twin daughters. His trial began in February 2007, five years following the deaths of the children. Hart’s defense maintained that he suffered an epileptic episode, leading to his children being unsupervised and ultimately ending up in the lake. His confession, his lawyer argued, was coerced by undercover police officers whom Nelson was trying to impress in order to keep his cash flow in his new career as a criminal operative.
Hart was ultimately convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison. Now, lawyers representing Nelson filed an appeal on his behalf, claiming that the videotaped confession obtained by the police was not admissible due to the coercive nature of the confession, combined with the inducements promised to Nelson through the Mr. Big sting operation. The Supreme Court appeal ultimately agreed and tossed out the confession, leaving the Crown with the option to prove its case against Hart without the videotaped confession that they obtained during this operation.
The court also noted that Hart, who had been denied the chance to testify in his original trial due to his fears of speaking in public, should have been accommodated and allowed to testify in private due to his tendency toward epileptic seizures brought on by stress. Eventually, in 2014, twelve years after his daughters drowned under his watch, Nelson was released from jail with the guarantee that he would never face more charges. Donovan Malloy, director of public prosecutions, said the confessions obtained by the police were central to the Crown’s case against Nelson and that he could not proceed with a new trial without them because he knew that without these statements, there was no likelihood of conviction. So, he released Nelson.
Wow, that story is so crazy. But let’s go back to Leslie. One idiot. Her life was obviously fucked, which is probably why she was drinking so much and taking so many drugs. Whatever the case, whatever the reason was—call it child abuse, call it trauma, or whatever, I am sure that played a part—she put a bullet in her twin sons’ heads. A bullet, in cold blood, because her husband wanted to leave. Why do you think he wanted to leave you, you fucking idiot?
And as for Nelson, I mean, that story I just have to take at face value. There is nobody else, is there? He has got a history of medical conditions. He has suffered from different kinds of addictions, like gambling and all that kind of stuff. And if he says he had a seizure, and if there was no other evidence or whatever in this case, then, well, I mean, there is not much you can do but to let him free. If you believe he drowned his children, fair, that is completely fine. But given the evidence at the time, I do not think you can really convict him, which is why the police had to go through this big, elaborate scam of a Mr. Big sting operation. Which, I am not going to lie, was actually well done. What a way to trap a man, you know?
But yeah, anyway, comment and tell me what you think.
